"For Thy Best Beauty": Canticles and Collectivity in Early America.

Abstract: My dissertation explores the history of gendered collectivity in early America through the defining role of Canticles (or Song of Songs) and its relative eclipse in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Drawing on a range of writing in print and archival sources, I examine sermons, poems, scriptural annotations and pamphlets to show that gendered notions of collectivity wer... read moree pivotal in early America, first, for Puritanism and, second, for modes of affiliation that take as their starting point distance from religion and religious dispute. Combining a historical study of religion and gender with a theoretical approach to belief, this work seeks to explain the emergence of bourgeois community in early America by demonstrating why men in the eighteenth century began to think of themselves as united in brotherhood distinct from religious affiliation and state authority. The dissertation probes the relationship between religion, early modern discourses on sexuality and the rise of bourgeois economic relations even as it revises accounts that situate Puritanism as the origin of secular liberalism and modern sexuality. read less